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A NEW WAY OF THINKING

Do you ever feel as if you are in a rut? You know, getting up each day and going through the same motions, carrying out all the “stuff” that makes up your day in pretty much the same way as the day before. And the weekends – well they tend in the same direction – repeats of the weekends before, with appropriate seasonal adjustments. Do you imagine this is what life is supposed to be like? I don’t.

Christians look at Easter as the signature event of their faith; this is THE event that changes everything. Yet making the connection between a boring, “same old, same old” way of living and our faith in Jesus may appear to be a stretch. But it is a matter of perspective – how I think about life and the reasons behind everything I am and do. Once a Christian, and that means baptized into Life in Jesus, embraces this amazing status, everything changes. We think differently. We revise the reasons behind our actions in the Light of the Gospel.

From the earliest days the Church calls this personal development “metanoia”. It is the essential formula that changes our lives and opens one to a whole new way of being. For the Christian, there is a continual renewing of life and love – little remains static. In fact our journey “in Christ” is to develop us into an ever deeper relationship with the Son of God, in and through the Holy Spirit. There is NO limit to where this leads, it beckons us each new day into a life that is dynamic, even if our life appears to be routine.

How the Church presents this magnificent and amazing plan to all people is in and through “EVANGELIZATION. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in an address to catechists and religion teachers in 2000 said: To evangelize means: to teach the art of living. At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to evangelize the poor (Luke 4:18); this means: I have the response to your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness—rather: I am that path.

The Cardinal continued his comments with these insights: The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice—all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we are in need of a new evangelization—if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works. But this art is not the object of a science — this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life—He who is. May the saving message of Jesus Christ bring us into the light with new insights to address the pressing issues of our time about the “Art of Living”.